A critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-1801, has been discovered in the Ansible AAP-Gateway, affecting the gateway grpc service. This flaw stems from a concurrency issue due to race condition requests against the proxy, potentially allowing a less privileged user to obtain the JWT (JSON Web Token) of a greater privileged user. Such an exploit could lead to the server being jeopardized, with user sessions or confidential data being left vulnerable.

In this post, we will go over the details of this vulnerability, provide code snippets to illustrate the problem, and discuss possible mitigation strategies. We will reference the original sources for further details.

The Vulnerability – Race Condition and Concurrency Issues

A race condition occurs when the behavior of a system depends on the relative timing of events. In this specific case, the Ansible AAP Gateway GRPC (gRPC Remote Procedure Calls) service is affected by a concurrency issue, which may result in concurrent requests mishandling.

When multiple requests are sent simultaneously to the grpc service, a less privileged user could potentially access the JWT of a higher privileged user. This unauthorized access can lead to severe consequences, as the server could be compromised, and user sessions or confidential information left vulnerable.

The following code snippet demonstrates the race condition issue in the Ansible AAP Gateway GRPC service:

# AAP-Gateway GRPC service code snippet (vulnerable)

from concurrent import futures
import grpc

class GRPCService(servicer):
    def __init__(self):
        self.proxy = Proxy()

    def HandleRequest(self, request, context):
        # Fetch the JWT for the current request
        jwt = self.proxy.get_jwt(request)
        # Process the request and return the response
        response = self.proxy.process_request(jwt, request)
        return response

def serve():
    server = grpc.server(futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=10))
    add_GRPCServiceServicer_to_server(GRPCService(), server)
    server.add_insecure_port('[::]:50051')
    server.start()
    server.wait_for_termination()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    serve()

1. Official CVE-2025-1801 Entry
2. Ansible AAP Gateway Official Repository
3. GRPC Official Documentation

Exploit Details

Currently, there are no known exploits actively targeting this vulnerability in the wild. Nonetheless, considering the criticality of the vulnerability, security professionals are urged to patch their systems and implement mitigation strategies.

Mitigation Strategies

The best way to counteract this vulnerability is to update the Ansible AAP Gateway to the latest version, which addresses the race condition issue. If an update is not possible, the following mitigation techniques can be applied:

Limit the number of concurrent requests allowed for the gateway GRPC service.

2. Implement strong access control mechanisms to ensure only authorized users have access to the GRPC service.

In Conclusion

CVE-2025-1801 is a critical vulnerability in the Ansible AAP Gateway, potentially allowing a less privileged user to access the JWT of a higher privileged user. This issue stems from a race condition, which results in concurrency issues with concurrent requests. To safeguard systems, it is essential to update the affected software or implement mentioned mitigation strategies to limit potential attacks.

Timeline

Published on: 03/03/2025 15:15:16 UTC